Holistic Feathers

Lovingkindness practice

The practice of Loving Kindness was first taught by Buddha as an antidote to fear. He sent a group of monks to meditate in a forest that was inhabited by tree spirits. The spirits resented the presence of the monks and tried to drive them away by appearing as horrible visions. The monks were terrified and ran back to Buddha, begging him to send them to a different forest. He said; ‘I am going to send you back to the forest, but I will provide you with the only protection you need.’ He then gave the first teaching on metta, loving-kindness. When the monks returned to the forest and practiced loving-kindness, the tree spirits were so moved by the loving energy that filled the forest that they resolved to care for and serve the monks in whatever way they could.” -Sogyal Rinpoche

All the great spiritual traditions emphasize the need for compassion and unconditional love. Buddhists call this “boddichitta”–the awakened heart–which is the aspiration for others to be happy and free from suffering. It is the essence of enlightenment, the heart of enlightened activity. True compassion is called the “wish-fulfilling jewel” because it has the power to give each person precisely what he or she most needs to release suffering and be happy. But how can you cultivate it? Here are some traditional methods for practicing loving kindness:

Develop an attitude of equanimity. Practice going beyond your fixed ideas of friends and enemies. The idea is to develop a sense of spaciousness, letting go of rigid ideas. Over the years, anyone who has once been an enemy may now have turned into a friend, and vice-versa. Everything is impermanent and constantly changing. Step back and observe the dance of life with detachment. This lays the ground for the practice of loving kindness.

Reflect on the kindness of others. This will help you see the positive side of any situation, regardless of how difficult. Contemplate what other people have done for you in both large and small ways. Focus on a specific friend or family member, and remember all the good they have done. You might want to begin by remembering the love and devotion of your mother or father or grandparents, and then move on to everyone you know. If you are open to the idea of reincarnation, consider that anyone could have been your mother, father, sister or brother in a previous life, so reflect on how they might have nurtured and supported you.

Remember an experience of love that someone gave you. Reflect on how it really moved you. Remember vividly that feeling of love and let it arise again in your heart, filling you with gratitude. Let your heart open and allow your love to flow out to others. See yourself unsealing a spring of love within you that flows out to friends, family, neighbors, all those you like, all those you dislike, to every person around the world, and to all sentient beings. Let your love deepen and become boundless.

Repay the kindness of others. Take the perspective that many, many people (as well as many plants, animals, etc.) have helped you. Everyone you meet may have helped you in some way, directly or indirectly. Every encounter becomes an opportunity to repay someone’s kindness. This attitude can change your life. Traditionally, it’s called “the great activity” because it is so vast that it’s difficult to imagine.

Contemplate the positive qualities of others. If you care for someone, you naturally see their delightful qualities and usually ignore their negative qualities. Extend this perspective to everyone, one person at a time. Generate loving kindness towards each person and the wish for him or her to be happy. This can help transform negative emotions such as anger or jealousy.

Consider others the same as yourself. Reflect on another person, not in their role as a relative or friend, but simply as another “you”, with the same feelings as you–the same desire for happiness, the same fear of suffering. This will give you greater insight into how to truly help someone. It will also aid in opening up your relationships and giving them deeper meaning.

Meditate on compassion. Contemplate on both the essence and expression of compassion. Reflect on the benefits of compassion and the effects of its opposite. See compassion as empathy, based on understanding the universal nature of suffering. Each of us suffers when our ego is self-centered and grasping. Offer a blessing of kindness to all who suffer, helping them transform their pain, and awaken to the boundless love that dwells within their own heart.

Loving-kindness meditation can be brought in to support the practice of ‘bare attention’ to help keep the mind open and sweet. It provides the essential balance to support your insight meditation practice.

It is a fact of life that many people are troubled by difficult emotional states in the pressured societies we live in, but do little in terms of developing skills to deal with them. Yet even when the mind goes sour it is within most people’s capacity to arouse positive feelings to sweeten it. Loving-kindness is a meditation practice taught by the Buddha to develop the mental habit of selfless or altruistic love. In the Dhammapada can be found the saying: “Hatred cannot coexist with loving-kindness, and dissipates if supplanted with thoughts based on loving-kindness.”

Loving-kindness is a meditation practice, which brings about positive attitudinal changes as it systematically develops the quality of ‘loving-acceptance’. It acts, as it were, as a form of self-psychotherapy, a way of healing the troubled mind to free it from its pain and confusion. Of all Buddhist meditations, loving-kindness has the immediate benefit of sweetening and changing old habituated negative patterns of mind.

To put it into its context, Loving-kindness is the first of a series of meditations that produce four qualities of love: Friendliness (metta), Compassion (karuna), Appreciative Joy (mudita) and Equanimity (upekkha). The quality of ‘friendliness’ is expressed as warmth that reaches out and embraces others. When loving-kindness practice matures it naturally overflows into compassion, as one empathises with other people’s difficulties; on the other hand one needs to be wary of pity, as its near enemy, as it merely mimics the quality of concern without empathy. The positive expression of empathy is an appreciation of other people’s good qualities or good fortune, or appreciative joy, rather than feelings of jealousy towards them. This series of meditations comes to maturity as ‘on-looking equanimity’. This ‘engaged equanimity’ must be cultivated within the context of this series of meditations, or there is a risk of it manifesting as its near enemy, indifference or aloofness. So, ultimat ely you remain kindly disposed and caring toward everybody with an equal spread of loving feelings and acceptance in all situations and relationships.

How to do it . . .

The practice always begins with developing a loving acceptance of yourself. If resistance is experienced then it indicates that feelings of unworthiness are present. No matter, this means there is work to be done, as the practice itself is designed to overcome any feelings of self-doubt or negativity. Then you are ready to systematically develop loving-kindness towards others.

Four Types of Persons to develop loving-kindness towards:
* a respected, beloved person – such as a spiritual teacher;
* a dearly beloved – which could be a close family member or friend;
* a neutral person – somebody you know, but have no special feelings towards, e.g.: a person who serves you in a shop;
* a hostile person – someone you are currently having difficulty with.

Starting with yourself, then systematically sending loving-kindness from person to person in the above order will have the effect of breaking down the barriers between the four types of people and yourself. This will have the effect of breaking down the divisions within your own mind, the source of much of the conflict we experience. If you are practicing intensively, just a word of caution, it is best if you choose a member of the same sex or, if you have a sexual bias to your own sex, a person of the opposite sex. This is because of the risk that the near enemy of loving-kindness, lust, can be aroused. Try different people to practice on, as some people do not easily fit into the above categories, but do try to keep to the prescribed order.

Ways of arousing feelings of loving-kindness:

1. Visualization – Bring up a mental picture. See yourself or the person the feeling is directed at smiling back at you or just being joyous.

2. By reflection – Reflect on the positive qualities of a person and the acts of kindness they have done. And to yourself, making an affirmation, a positive statement about yourself, using your own words.

3. Auditory – This is the simplest way but probably the most effective. Repeat an internalized mantra or phrase such as ‘loving-kindness’.

The visualizations, reflections and the repetition of loving-kindness are devices to help you arouse positive feelings of loving-kindness. You can use all of them or one that works best for you. When the positive feeling arise, switch from the devices to the feeling, as it is the feeling that is the primary focus. Keep the mind fixed on the feeling, if it strays bring it back to the device, or if the feelings weaken or are lost then return to the device, i.e. use the visualisation to bring back or strengthen the feeling.

The second stage is Directional Pervasion where you systematically project the aroused feeling of loving-kindness to all points of the compass: north, south, east and west, up and down, and all around. This directional pervasion will be enhanced by bringing to mind loving friends and like-minded communities you know in the cities, towns and countries around the world.

Non-specific Pervasion tends to spontaneously happen as the practice matures. It is not discriminating. It has no specific object and involves just naturally radiating feelings of universal love. When it arises the practice has then come to maturity in that it has changed particular, preferential love, which is an attached love, to an all-embracing unconditional love!

Loving-kindness is a heart meditation and should not to be seen as just a formal sitting practice removed from everyday life. So take your good vibes outside into the streets, at home, at work and into your relationships. Applying the practice to daily life is a matter of directing a friendly attitude and having openness toward everybody you relate to, without discrimination.

There are as many different ways of doing it as there are levels of intensity in the practice. This introduction is intended to help you familiarize yourself with the basic technique, so that you can become established in the practice before going on, if you wish, to the deeper, systematic practice – to the level of meditative absorption.

May you be happy hearted!

(c) Enlightenment Chapel, Inc.

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